Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ( ; ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern subculture."Friedrich Nietzsche," by Dale Wilkerson, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, , http://www.iep.utm.edu/nietzch/ . 14 October 2015.Raymond A. Belliotti, Jesus or Nietzsche: How Should We Live Our Lives? (Rodopi, 2013), 195–201 Wicks, R. (Summer 2011) "Friedrich Nietzsche". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Retrieved 6 October 2011. Influence By World War I, Nietzsche had acquired a reputation as an inspiration for both right-wing German militarism and leftist politics. German soldiers received copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as gifts during World War I. The Dreyfus affair provides a contrasting example of his reception: the French antisemitic Right labelled the Jewish and leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as "Nietzscheans".Schrift, A.D. (1995). Nietzsche's French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism. Routledge. . Nietzsche had a distinct appeal for many Zionist thinkers around the start of the 20th century, most notable being Ahad Ha'am, Hillel Zeitlin, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, A. D. Gordon and Martin Buber, who went so far as to extoll Nietzsche as a "creator" and "emissary of life". Chaim Weizmann was a great admirer of Nietzsche; the first president of Israel sent Nietzsche's books to his wife, adding a comment in a letter that "This was the best and finest thing I can send to you." Israel Eldad, the ideological chief of the Stern Gang that fought the British in Palestine in the 1940s, wrote about Nietzsche in his underground newspaper and later translated most of Nietzsche's books into Hebrew.Zev Golan, God, Man and Nietzsche, iUniverse, 2007, p. 169: "It would be most useful if our youth climbed, even if only briefly, to Zarathustra's heights..." Eugene O'Neill remarked that Zarathustra influenced him more than any other book he ever read. He also shared Nietzsche's view of tragedy. Plays The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed are an example of Nietzsche's influence on O'Neill. Nietzsche's influence on the works of Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno can be seen in the popular Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno summed up Nietzsche's philosophy as expressing the "humane in a world in which humanity has become a sham." Nietzsche's growing prominence suffered a severe setback when his works became closely associated with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Many political leaders of the twentieth century were at least superficially familiar with Nietzsche's ideas, although it is not always possible to determine whether they actually read his work. It is debated among scholars whether Hitler read Nietzsche, although if he did his reading of him may not have been extensive."We know, from his Hitler's secretary, that he could quote Schopenhauer by the page, and the other German philosopher of willpower, Nietzsche, whose works he afterwards presented to Mussolini, was often on his lips." Trevor Roper, H. The Mind of Adolf Hitler, p. xxxvii. Introductory essay for Hitler's Table Talk 1941–1944 Secret Conversations. Enigma Books (2008)"'Landsberg,' Hitler told Hans Frank, was his 'university paid for by the state.' He read, he said, everything he could get hold of: Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx, Bismarck's Thoughts and Memories, and the war memoirs of German and allied generals and statesmen....But Hitler's reading and reflection were anything but academic, doubtless he did read much. However, as was noted in an earlier chapter, he made clear in My Struggle that reading for him had purely an instrumental purpose. He read not for knowledge or enlightenment, but for confirmation of his own preconceptions." Kershaw, Ian Hitler: Hubris 1889–1936. WW Norton p. 240Weaver Santaniello, Nietzsche, God, and the Jews, SUNY Press, 1994, p. 41: "Hitler probably never read a word of Nietzsche."Berel Lang, Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History, Indiana University Press, 2005, p. 162: "Arguably, Hitler himself never read a word of Nietzsche; certainly, if he did read him, it was not extensively." He was a frequent visitor to the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and did use expressions of Nietzsche's, such as "lords of the earth" in Mein Kampf.William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Touchstone, 1959, pp. 100–01 The Nazis made selective use of Nietzsche's philosophy. Mussolini,Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy, University of California Press, 2000, p. 44: "In 1908 he presented his conception of the superman's role in modern society in a writing on Nietzsche titled "The Philosophy of Force."Philip Morgan, Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945, Routledge, 2003, p. 21: "We know that Mussolini had read Nietzsche" Charles de GaulleJ. L. Gaddis, P. H. Gordon, E. R. May, J. Rosenberg, Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 217: "The son of a history teacher, de Gaulle read voraciously as a boy and young man—Jacques Bainville, Henri Bergson, Friederich Nietzsche, Maurice Barres—and was steeped in conservative French historical and philosophical traditions." and Huey P. Newton read Nietzsche. Richard Nixon read Nietzsche with "curious interest," and his book Beyond Peace might have taken its title from Nietzsche's book Beyond Good and Evil which Nixon read beforehand. Bertrand Russell wrote that Nietzsche had exerted great influence on philosophers and on people of literary and artistic culture, but warned that the attempt to put Nietzsche's philosophy of aristocracy into practice could only be done by an organization similar to the Fascist or the Nazi party. References Category:Weimar Republic